Tools for identifying patents for a particular purpose such as a prior art search, validity analysis, or a freedom to operate investigation, operate by performing Boolean queries using various search operators. These operators allow for searching by date, terms, document number, and patent classification, among others. These tools further allow for searching individual document portions such as a document title, abstract, or claim set.
Other searching tools accept freeform text. Such tools accept a freeform text block and extract information from the text block deemed most likely to return acceptable results. However, such tools are still limited to only performing Boolean queries and displaying a list of results.
These search tools often provide large numbers of results, most of which are irrelevant. These tools fail to present results in a manner allowing for quick relevancy determinations. The presentation also fails to provide enough detail suggesting how to adjust a search for obtaining only relevant results. Further, the search tools provide the documents of the result set in a manner very similar to the traditional paper format of the documents.